amudu

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Biofuels Take Off

The European Commission, meanwhile, vowed last week to facilitate the emerging bio jet fuel movement, launching an initiative with Airbus, major airlines, and European biofuel producers to push the supply of aviation biofuels to two million tons per year by 2020. The biofuels are to be produced in Europe from European-grown feedstocks.

Taking off: Last week, this Boeing 747 became the first commercial jet to use a biofuel-jet fuel blend to make a transatlantic flight.
Credit: Boeing

ENERGY

Biofuels Take Off

KLM and Lufthansa say they'll burn bio-based jet fuel on regular routes.

BY PETER FAIRLEY

Audio »

While U.S. airlines have yet to announce biofuels-based flights, they are promising to do so. Last week, the Air Transport Association of America, an industry trade group, said that nine airlines have committed to using biofuels from Washington-based Solena Fuels for flights out of San Francisco Bay-area airports. Solena's process uses gasification to break down municipal and agricultural wastes into syngas (carbon monoxide and hydrogen), which it then converts it into synthetic fuels.

Such biomass-to-liquids jet fuel was approved for aviation use by ASTM last year. However, Solena has yet to finance its proposed $300 million plant because of high costs and a dearth of policy supports in the United States for bio-based jet fuels.

Englewood, Colorado-based Gevo announced progress last week toward ASTM certification for a third process for producing bio jet fuel: upgrading alcohol biofuels. Gevo is converting corn fermentation plants to produce bio-butanol instead of ethanol, and says it can upgrade its bio-butanol to jet fuel at a relatively low cost.

Gevo executive vice president Jack Huttner says acceptance of testing data by an ASTM technical panel last week puts its bio-butanol based jet fuel on track for testing in jet engines early next year and for certification in 2013. He says Gevo already negotiated a supply agreement with airlines operating out of O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.

According to Huttner, biofuels producers don't need to match the price of petroleum jet fuel to begin selling to airlines. "There is a value to the airlines to having alternative supplies of their most important raw material. That option value would enable them to pay a little more for a certain portion of their fuel mix to be able to hedge against spikes in oil," says Huttner.

The problem with Gevo's fuel is its source. Unless Gevo can convert its plants to use biomass instead of food-based feedstocks—an upgrade Gevo is working on—its fuel will have a carbon footprint similar to ethanol's and will compete with food markets. According to KLM and Lufthansa and the European Commission, those are deal breakers.

Last week, for the first time, a jumbo jet used a blend of biofuel and kerosene on a transatlantic flight. Also last week, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines announced a biofuel supply agreement to commence regular flights on a biofuel-petroleum blend on 200 Amsterdam-to-Paris runs starting in September. Lufthansa could beat it by a month under previously announced plans to launch a six-month test on Frankfurt-Hamburg flights.

Such regularly scheduled operations mark a big jump from the one-off biofuels flights that airlines have conducted since 2009. Aviation and biofuels sources say this indicates that biofuel-based jet fuels are ready to be scaled up. Amy Bann, director of environmental policy for Boeing's commercial airplanes division, says the KLM and Lufthansa announcements "signal to governments, fuel processors, and the financial community that the demand and market for these fuels exist."

Pressure to cap and ultimately reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is driving the developments. The European Commission is making flights within, into, and out of Europe subject to its carbon-trading scheme starting in 2012—a move that will cost the aviation industry an estimated €1.4 billion ($2 billion) next year and about €7 billion by 2020, according to a March 2011 report by Oslo-based consultancy Thomson Reuters Point Carbon.

Environmental groups say biofuels make sense for aviation, since they are the sector's only alternative to petroleum. "You're not going to have electric airplanes," says Kate McMahon, biofuels campaign coordinator for Washington-based Friends of the Earth.

What has enabled aviation biofuels to shift to limited commercial service is the certification earlier this month of biofuels derived from animal and vegetable oils by standards body ASTM International. The provisional approval, to be finalized by August, covers aviation biofuels produced from oils via hydroprocessing—a catalytic process used in petroleum refining.

Hydroprocessed oil from camelina, a biofuels crop, powered Boeing's historic transatlantic flight last week (the flight was also the first in which all four engines of a commercial aircraft were flown on a biofuel blend). Camelina can be grown on wheat fields during periods when the fields would otherwise be left fallow, and thus shouldn't drive up food prices. And because the crop can be grown on existing fields, it can also avoid undesirable land use changes, such as the deforestation associated with palm oil cultivation in Southeast Asia.

KLM and Lufthansa also plan to use hydroprocessed oils as their biofuel source. KLM's will be produced from waste cooking oil by Dynamic Fuels, the Geismar, Louisiana-based joint venture of Tyson Foods and process developer Syntroleum. Finnish refiner Neste Oil will supply Lufthansa's biofuel blend by hydroprocessing oils from an as-yet-undisclosed feedstock that Lufthansa says will be "sustainable."

Polarized 3-D

NEX

T

Toshiba

This laptop can display 3-D content without requiring the user to wear special glasses. The computer’s Web camera tracks the location of the user’s face, and then the surface of the display is polar- ized accordingly to deliver separate images to each eye. Regions of the screen where no 3-D content is playing are left unpolarized.

Product: Qosmio Notebook

Cost: $1,900

Availability: End of 2011

Source: www.toshiba.co.jp

Company: Toshiba

New Laptops

What is Audit?

Once upon a time there was a shepherd looking after
his sheep on the side of a deserted road. Suddenly a brand new Porsche
screeches to a halt. The driver, a man dressed in an Armani suit,
Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, TAG-Heuer wrist-watch, and a Pierre
Cardin tie gets out and asks the shepherd, 'If I can tell you how many
sheep you have, will you give me one of them?' The shepherd looks at
the young man, then looks at the large flock of grazing sheep and
replies, 'Okay.'The young man parks the car, connects his laptop to
the mobile-fax, enters a NASA Website, scans the ground using his GPS,
opens a database and 60 Excel tables filled with algorithms and pivot
tables. He then prints out a 150-page report on his high-tech
mini-printer, turns to the shepherd and says, â€˜'You have exactly 1,586
sheep.' The shepherd cheers, 'That's correct, you can have your
sheep.'The young man takes one of the animals from the flock and puts
it in the back of his Porsche. The shepherd looks at him and asks, 'If
I guess your profession, will you return my animal to me?' The young
man answers, 'Yes, why not?' The shepherd says, 'You are an auditor.'
'How did you know?' asks the young man. 'Very simple,' answers the
shepherd.'Firstly, you came here without being wanted.Secondly, you
charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew. Thirdly, you
don't understand anything about my business.....Now can I have my dog
back? '

Why the Internet Is Fundamentally Less Secure Than It Used To Be

Your passwords are stored on more sites than ever—too bad you've never bothered to change them.

CHRISTOPHER MIMS

The Maginot Line: This is what your passwords look like to hackers

Your company's data is only as secure as the weakest security of the most fly-by-night website to which anyone in your organization has ever given their password.

Think about that for a moment: One of your summer interns used the same password on your company intranet as they use on the hacked-together open source message board on which they swap stories with their friends about how awesome it was to do whippets around the campfire at last year's Bonnaroo.

That's why leaks of user data and passwords like the kind that are happening with increasing frequency are so devastating -- no security system can protect a web application from a user who has the keys required to get in. (Aside: That's not entirely true; two-factor authentication systems can, but they're not common.)

One way to make your web identities more secure -- there's no such thing as actually securing them -- is simply to acknowledge that there are entire classes of websites for which you should simply pretend that your password is already public. Think of anything short of your bank and your email service provider as compromised-in-advance. (Although even your bank may be compromised already.)

The more often you re-use a password, the less secure that password is. (Unless you're using a system like 1password, which can generate and remember a new, significantly-more-secure-than-average password for each site.)

That's why last December I outlined my own system for attempting to keep my logins secure. Since then I've simplified it: you need only memorize three passwords. Enforcing this personally can help keep your data secure; making it a company-wide policy to force users to periodically update their accounts with unique, strong passwords is an important part of keeping an entire network secure.

1. All sites other than your email account and anyplace that stores your bank or credit card information get a throwaway password. Facebook, Twitter, the billion other sites that require a login -- forget it; they're toast. Would it kill you to have these accounts hacked? If the answer is no, these are the sites that are among the 97 percent or so of sites you use that will all be secured by the same password.

2. Sites with your credit card or bank information get a unique, secure password that you use on no other sites. Here are some tips on creating a secure password.

3. Your email account gets a totally unique, secure password used on no other sites. God only knows what's in your Gmail. Enough sensitive data to bury your online life forever. Make sure the only way to ever give an attacker access to this email is by going in the front door -- through Google's security -- and not by simply punching in a password they found elsewhere, on a less-secure site. Accessing Gmail with a password that was re-used on other, compromised sites is the most common way that Gmail is "hacked."

Also: learn how to recognize phishing attacks. This is the other most common way that users give up access to their email accounts.